Flower woodcut Penelope. ~A Song Cycle~ by Sarah Kirkland Snider

Penelope Mastered!

Michael, Lawson, and Sarah

Michael, Lawson, and Sarah. Penelope is MIXED.

At long last, Penelope is ready to print.  Mastering the album took a bit longer than expected because, as it turns out, mastering a record for voice, orchestra, drums, guitars, and electronics is not so easy.  Particularly when the music is not clearly of one genre or another.  Do you master it like a pop record, so everything has roughly the same sonic punch, or do you master it like a classical record, so that details of intricate contrapuntal passages aren’t lost?  (It’s hard to do both at the same time.)  Our mastering engineer, the superb Tatsuya Sato of Sterling Sound (one of the best mastering houses in New York), felt strongly that we not sacrifice compositional detail for the sake of making every moment of the album as loud as other records we felt Penelope bore spiritual kinship to.  So the result is that the record is on the “quieter” side, with a large dynamic range, which is something that should make the folks fighting the good fight over at the loudness wars (did you know there was such a war? or that there werenon-profits and other non-profits dedicated to fighting compression and volume inflation?!) happy.

Now, on to printing the album artwork, which was rendered exquisitely by the uber-and-multi-talented DM Stith (whose music, by the way, if you haven’t heard, you should hasten to hear immediately.  Dreamily gorgeous stuff.)

Penelope the album releases October 2010!  Precise release date and info about the NYC record release show coming soon… as well as information on the upcoming video for “The Lotus Eaters,” directed by the magnificent Murat Eyuboglu.

No Responses to “Penelope Mastered!”

  1. I listen (and watched) the Lotus Eaters video. Lovely stuff. The recorded music was fantastic and thank you for not squashing it in mastering! The tones are superb. Who was your Engineer?
    -John

    • Sarah says:

      Thanks John! The album producer is Lawson White, then of Clinton Studios, where we recorded. The head engineer when we tracked was Ed Rak. All amazing folks over there. Cheers and thanks for the kind words.


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